Madeleine O. Hosli

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Leiden University

What caused Dutch citizens to vote 'no' in the 2005 and 2016 referendums? How do these referendum outcomes compare to voting patterns in European Union (EU) member states more generally? How are national-level referendums related to European integration? In a comparative analysis, we explore such questions based on information and data on two Dutch...

What caused Dutch citizens to vote ‘no’ in the 2005 and 2016 referendums? How do these referendum outcomes compare to voting patterns in European Union (EU) member states more generally? How are national-level referendums related to European integration? In a comparative analysis, we explore such questions based on information and data on two Dutch...

In this chapter, we study voting behavior in the Council of the European Union (EU) for the time span of 2010 to 2021. We use Council voting data, examining the impact of different independent variables on member states’ voting behavior: net contributions to the EU budget, voting power, left–right policy positions, and finally, the distance of a me...

Using historical institutionalism as a theoretical foundation, this paper explores whether multilateral surveillance and policy coordination under the European Semester (ES), introduced in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, was based on a path-changing or a path-dependent mechanism. Following a legal-historical analysis goin...

This chapter provides an overview of institutions and measures aiming to tackle challenges to two groups of persons likely to be strongly affected by efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis: women on the one hand and children on the other. The two groups cannot be entirely separated from each other and neither can measures to protect them. While some...

The European Parliament (EP) has seen a gradual increase in its powers since the introduction of direct elections in 1979. Scholars have focused on both individual-level and aggregate factors to explain turnout rates in EP elections over time, including increased levels of EU politicization and the rise in support for Eurosceptic parties. However,...

This chapter provides an overview of institutions and measures aiming to tackle challenges to two groups of persons likely to be strongly affected by efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis: women on the one hand and children on the other. The two groups cannot be entirely separated from each other and neither can measures to protect them. While some...

The shift from response to recovery is now noticeable as the world moves past the paralyzing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book explores responses to the pandemic by international, regional, and local institutions, multilateral action, and crisis prevention efforts at different levels of governance, with a specific focus on the situation o...

The Future of Multilateralism addresses current challenges and future perspectives of international and regional organizations. It aims to uncover how stable the foundations of global cooperation really are, particularly in the light of the latest unilateral and protectionist practices of international players and challenges related to COVID-19. Th...

This chapter focuses on the United Nations and challenges to multilateralism. Clearly, the United Nations is a core example of an international, multilateral organization which due to nationalistic and populist trends in several of its member states experiences pressures on its operations and its sources of funding. This is true for the United Nati...

This chapter explores how the African Union (AU) operates in a multilateral setting and how it interacts with the United Nations (UN) to engage in crucial developments, including steps towards the Agenda 2063 and ‘Silencing the Guns by 2020’. Clearly, the AU can benefit from multilateralism, both in a regional and international context. AU member s...

An important aspect of the EU’s external affairs is ‘interregionalism’. As this chapter demonstrates, the EU’s interregional approach has gradually achieved an important position in European integration and in EU foreign policy. It serves to enhance peaceful and cooperative relations of the EU with other world regions, while strengthening support f...

International relations theories attempt to explain and extrapolate possible outcomes with regard to policy issues, foreign policy decisions, war propensity and animosity between states as well as the structure of the international system. The relevance of the major international relations theories has been a matter of much debate throughout the la...

The chapter explores how the Security Council has reacted to the changing global order in terms of institutional reform and its working methods. First, we look at how the Security Council’s setup looks increasingly anachronistic against the tremendous shifts in global power. Yet, established and rising powers are not disengaging. In contrast, they...

This volume offers a comprehensive evaluation of the concept of global order, with a particular emphasis on the role of regional organisations within global governance institutions such as the United Nations. Building from a solid theoretical base it draws upon the expertise of numerous leading international scholars offering a broad array of timel...

Decision-making on the optimum transition pathway to an energy economy that meets agreed carbon reduction goals in the European Union (EU) by 2050 is challenging, because of the size of the infrastructural legacy, technological uncertainties, affordability and assumptions on future energy demand. This task is even more complicated in transportati...

This paper studies how voting rules affect the ease with which decisions are made, basing the analysis on the key premise that ideology makes some coalitions more likely to form than others. Our study focuses on the Council of the European Union (EU), where member states hold different voting weights and ideological positions are strongly linked to...

Due to various institutional adaptations over time, the European Union (EU) has gradually obtained stronger means to coordinate the – often – divergent preferences of its member states in foreign policy and to act with one voice. But how can we assess this cohesiveness, ‘effectiveness’ or performance of the EU as a global actor, in empirical terms?...

The article explores how changed patterns of UN membership affected the prospects for UN Security Council institutional reform. First, we outline a theoretical framework based on path dependency, veto player analysis and social choice theory. Second, we offer calculations of decision probability and show that a higher voting threshold lowers chance...

Why does the Council of the European Union continue to function without apparent problems, despite the increase in the number and heterogeneity of its members brought about by the Eastern enlargement? We argue that the reason why the Council has not become paralysed lies in the increased delegation of its agenda load from the ministerial meetings d...

This article seeks to describe some important changes that have occurred in EU decision-making procedures since its eastern enlargement and to explain how it is that the decision-making process continues to function relatively smoothly in the EU even after a sharp increase in the number of Member States and despite generally shared fears to the con...

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the most important multilateral institutions having the ambition to shape global governance and the only organ of the global community that can adopt legally binding resolutions for the maintenance of international peace and security and, if necessary, authorize the use of force. Created in the a...

This paper focuses on effects of the Lisbon Treaty on the coherence of EU behaviour at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). It theorises the EU’s presence at the UNGA in terms of a principal–agent model wherein the EU and its entire membership are considered to constitute a collective principal while the actors playing the role of the agent have varied...

The Lisbon Treaty (2007) entered into force on 1 December 2009. It foresaw a number of changes in institutional relations and decision-making between the European Union (EU) institutions on the one hand and between the EU and its member states on the other. This special issue of West European Politics (WEP) focuses on decision-making in the Europea...

In literature on civil war resolution, several factors have been identified that may influence the peace process. In this paper, based on a combination of different datasets and additional information, we explore reasons for the initiation of negotiations and for the shortening of conflict duration based on 82 civil wars that took place between 194...

Which governments of European Union (EU) member states were most effective in the intergovernmental negotiations on the establishment of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)? Did Germany, France or the UK come out as losing or winning parties compared to their original priorities? Such questions are certainly relevant, not least currently...

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the only global institution with the right to legally adopt binding resolutions for the maintenance of international peace and security, and to authorize the use of force to that end. Since the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, there have been debates about who should be represented in this i...

This paper explores what preferences governments held in the negotiation process on the European Constitution regarding European Union (EU) institutional provisions and decision rules. Applying logistic regression and ordered probit techniques to the data collection 'Domestic Structures and European Integration' (DOSEI), and complemented by graphic...

Using data of contested decisions in the Council of the European Union, combined with data on the position of member states on the left-right and support for European integration dimensions, this paper provides an overview of winning coalitions formed in the council in the 1998 to 2004 time span. It shows distance between the combined policy positi...

This article explores voting patterns in the Council of the European Union between May 2004 and the end of December 2006, studying the full set of voting records for this institution. It analyses government vote choices in the Council on the basis of ordered logistic regression analysis, explaining the propensity of European Union (EU) Member State...

Studies of voting patterns in the Council of the European Union (EU) have increased since voting records in this institution have become more readily available. This paper builds on earlier work and explores coalition-formation and voting in the Council of the EU for the EU-15 (i.e., between 1995 and 2004), by analyzing cleavage patterns based on v...

Changing the composition and voting system of the Security Council, in an effort to increase the institution’s global legitimacy, is proving to be one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome for the global community of states represented in the United Nations (UN). This paper demonstrates that due to institutional hurdles, it is considerably more...

This paper aims to explore government preferences and cleavages in the bargaining process on the European Constitution, across the range of 25 EU member states. The study focuses on preferences concerning socioeconomic policymaking and explores whether divisions can be discerned between preferences held by actors according to locations on the left-...

This chapter analyzes decision quotas and the distribution of votes in the predominant intergovernmental institution of the European Union (EU): the Council of the EU. It shows trade-offs linked to the voting threshold and describes how EU member state representation has developed over time, given cumulative percentages of vote shares as compared t...

Not only does the level of public support for the EU seem to be gradually eroding, but the level of intra-national divergence of preferences regarding European integration may be increasing. Strengthening competencies at the European (EU) level seem to be met on the one hand by an increasingly euroskeptic public across the EU and on the other hand,...

Abstract This paper explores voting patterns in the Council of the European Union (EU) between May 2004 and the end of December 2006, studying the full set of voting records for this institution. It analyzes government,vote choices in the Council on the basis of ordered logistic regression analysis, explaining the propensity of EU member states to...

In the recent past, the choice of adequate voting weights and decision rules for the Council of the European Union (EU) has been a highly contested issue in EU intergovernmental negotiations. In general terms, the selection of a threshold for qualified majority votes (QMV) in the Council constitutes a trade-off in terms of decreased sovereignty for...

This paper aims to explore government preferences, cleavages, and pat-terns of coalition-formation among a variety of actors in the bargaining process on the European Constitution, across the range of twenty-five European Union (EU) member states. The study focuses on preferences concerning socio-economic policy-making and explores whether division...

This book examines how legislation is made in the European Union (EU). Taking decisions in the European Union requires overcoming controversy and disagreement. European decision-makers' ability to resolve controversy has been tested by three developments. First, the number of member states increased from six to 25, with the prospect of further enla...

What is the relative power of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP) in the European Union (EU)? Both scholars and practitioners of EU affairs provide different answers to this seemingly straightforward question. In this article, we examine the balance of power among these three actors in the context of l...

What determines the allocation of voting weights to member states in international organizations? What drives the seat and voting weight allocation in the European Parliament (EP) and in the Council of the European Union (EU)? Our objective in this article is to develop a universal logical model and to demonstrate that the resulting equation indeed...

The Convention on the Future of Europe that led to the eventual drafting of an EU Constitution involved numerous political actors from many countries. Their negotiations over the constitution generated a huge volume of texts containing substantive information about their preferences for EU institutional and political outcomes. In this paper, we att...

This response to Moberg (2002) demonstrates that some of his figures and calculations require more thorough analysis. His dismissal of the risk of inertia in the Council after enlargement, his measurement of blocking power of individual EU states and his figures on relative under- and over-representation of EU states in the Council are disputed. Th...

This paper examines whether the left-right cleavage, structuring preferences at the national level, has also been influential regarding the process of Constitution-building during the European Union (EU) Convention (2002-2003). Our approach to constitutionalism presumes that cleavage theory is well equipped to explain differences between parties, b...

[W]e present two multi-dimensional models of coalition-formation which are closely related. Both models predict policy outcomes and the winning coalitions that are associated with these outcomes. The basic idea of the two models is that distances between players' preferences contain information about the extent of conflict existing between them. Th...

In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union (EU) is often described as an “emerging federation.” This article claims that federalism is not exclusively useful in deliberating about the future of the EU. Non-statecentric conceptions of federalism provide a better understanding of the current structure and functioning of th...

Decisions in the Council of Ministers continue to be surrounded by secrecy as far as the details of the decision-making process are concerned. Most of the research on reform efforts has focused on increasing transparency and on facilitating the management of various auxiliary bodies of the Council. In addition, a central focus has been placed on re...

In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union is often described as an emerging federation. The paper claims that federalism is not only useful in deliberating about the future of the European Union. It provides a better understanding of the current structure and functioning of the European system of multilevel governance t...

The European Union (EU) is a continuously evolving entity. Starting with six member states in the late 1950s, the EU currently encompasses fifteen states of Western Europe. It is expected to almost double in size in the near future, however, taking in a number of states located in Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to Cyprus and Malta. This dr...

Vote allocations in the Council of the European Union (EU) are a crucial issue, especially in view of the increased use of qualified majority votes (QMV) and forthcoming significant rounds of EU enlargement. This article studies the distribution of votes in the Council from the first enlargement of the European Community (EC) in 1973 through to the...

The European economic and monetary union (EMU) is widely viewed as one of the most important developments in recent European integration. But it is less clear why EMU was started at all, and, more specifically,what the role of individual European Community (EC) member states has been in this process. Most importantly, some puzzling questions arise...

Resorting to political economy approaches, this paper attempts to associate the industrial structure in the European Union (EU) to the coalition formation process between European member states. Using a well-known measure of relative voting power, the (normalized) Banzhaf power index, we relax the common assumption that coalitions form randomly. In...

In contrast to traditional analyses of a priori voting power of member states in the European Union (EU), this paper measures the distribution of power among political parties at a specific point in time. It is assumed that in the European Parliament (EP) only ‘connected coalitions’ form. Power in the Council is assumed to be shared by the respecti...

This paper provides information on negotiation patterns in the EU and analyzes the influence of qualified majority voting on the formation of coalitions and the distribution of voting power among the EU states as represented in the Council. Important factors for this analysis are the weighting of votes in the Council, the respective majorities (or...

This article is concerned with challenges to reforming the voting procedures of the Council of the European Union (EU). The next major waves of EU enlargement will cause the Union to increase to a membership of first twenty-one, and then twenty-six or possibly even more states. How does enlargement affect the Council's inherent "capacity to act" un...

This article is interested in the "constitutional design" of the European Union (EU). Most prominently, it looks at the distribution of representation and votes in selected EU institutions to obtain an indication on how "flexible" this design is. The challenge of ensuring efficient decision-making while maintaining a "fair" representation of member...

Most decisions by the European Parliament are taken by an absolute majority of its members. Some decisions however – such as the approval of the budget of the European Union – require a two-thirds majority. The paper analyzes the a priori voting strength of the member states when their representatives vote coherently. It is shown that the increase...

In the beginning of 1995, the European Union (EU) has been enlarged by three countries: Austria, Finland, and Sweden. In view of the implications on the EU's institutional balance and the possible accession of more states in the future, different proposals are currently made to change the system of decision making to one that is more transparent an...

The article deals with the question of what (quantitative) influence Switzerland could potentially obtain as a Community Member State in the EC Council of Ministers. Since the introduction of the Single European Act, and even more after the Treaty on European Union will become effective, qualified majority voting is resorted to increasingly within...

Several member states of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) have applied for admission into the European Community (EC). As the Single European Act and possibly also the Treaty on European Union are being implemented, the distribution of EC Council voting power takes on growing importance, since the range of issues to be decided by qualifie...

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Resorting to political economy approaches, this paper attempts to associate the industrial structure in the European Union (EU) to the coalition formation process between European member states. Using a well-known measure of relative voting power, the (normalized) Banzhaf power index, we relax the common assumption that coalitions form randomly. In...

The choice of a decision rule for the Council of the EU constitutes a trade-off in terms of decreased sovereignty for individual governments versus an increased ‘capacity to act’. The provisions of the draft constitutional treaty would considerably increase constitutional flexibility regarding day-to-day decision-making in the EU, but without adequ...

This paper aims to include actor’s policy preferences into a probabilistic definition of two common indices of relative voting power: the Shapley-Shubik index and the (normalized) Banzhalf index. While we acknowledge the validity of standard indices and their strength in analyzing relative influence in institutions in an a priori, or ‘constitutiona...

The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) began on January 1, 1999. The European Central Bank has been set up in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Euro created. Looking at the intergovernmental negotiations that led to the establishment of the EMU, it is not initially clear, however, which European Union governments actually supported the EMU (and t...

Resorting to political economy approaches, this paper attempts to associate the industrial structure in the European Union (EU) to the coalition formation process between European member states. Using a well-known measure of relative voting power, the (normalized) Banzhaf power index, we relax the common assumption that coalitions form randomly. In...